Everyone is rushing to learn AI coding, as if mastering it guarantees software riches. Big-tech engineers are looking for an exit, product managers want to build their own MVPs, and non-technical people dream of getting rich through software.

But have you noticed something strange? The software you painstakingly built gets zero buyers once it goes online.

This isn’t a problem with your skills — the entire software market is undergoing an unprecedented “systematic collapse.”

Three Types of People All Fell Into the Same Trap

Let’s look at who is most eager to learn AI coding and what predicaments they each face:

These three groups share one fatal trait:

They all treat “knowing how to code” as their moat.

Big-tech engineers have strong skills but don’t know what to build that anyone will buy. Product managers finally break free from engineer dependency, excitedly build an MVP, only to watch it sink in a red-ocean market. Non-technical people have it worst — they haven’t even figured out where the market is before diving in headfirst.

Software Supply Side: Explosive Growth

Why can’t anyone sell what they build? Because the number of people who can build software is exploding at an alarming rate.

Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode — these AI coding tools have dropped the development barrier to historic lows.

When everyone can write software, software itself is no longer a moat.

In the past, developing an app required a professional team spending months. Now one person with AI tools can deliver in days. The supply side hasn’t just “increased a bit” — it has experienced explosive growth.

Software Demand Side: Cliff-Drop Plunge

While supply skyrockets, demand for purchasing software is experiencing a cliff-drop plunge.

Many software ideas can now be handled by AI Agents developed by large model companies — just add a SKILL, write some scripts connecting different services, and set up scheduled push notifications to fulfill most needs.

75% of traditional software demand has been directly eliminated by agents.

Even scarier, even users who used to pay for software have stopped buying. That browser translation plugin that cost $580 per year? Now anyone can build a replacement with AI in a single day.

So where did the money go? It all flows to Tokens — buying Claude subscriptions, buying GPT plans — users handle most needs themselves.

Before, one company built software and sold it to 100 customers. Now 10 companies fight over 1 customer.

This isn’t just a little harder — it’s 50x to 100x more brutal.

Capital Markets Already Cast a Vote of No Confidence

If the data above doesn’t shock you enough, see what Wall Street has to say:

Investors are telling you with real money: the golden age of SaaS is over.

This isn’t one feature defeating one product — the entire software industry is experiencing a systematic collapse.

The Market Hasn’t Disappeared — It’s Transforming

If selling general-purpose software is a dead end, where did the demand go?

The answer: the enterprise agent market.

In the past, when enterprises wanted to digitize, they’d buy ERP, buy CRM, hire outsourcing firms for custom development — easily spending hundreds of thousands to millions, with implementation cycles of six months to a year. After spending big, the systems were cumbersome, and companies often reverted to Excel.

Now? A skilled agent consultant, armed with deep industry understanding, spends 3 to 5 working days on-site using a “knowledge base + skills” approach to build the client’s core business processes into agents — accounting management, contract tracking, data reporting — all handled.

Over 80% of traditional software needs for SMEs will be rapidly replaced by agents.

The New Role Top AI Companies Are Fighting For: FDE

This transformation isn’t just changing business models — it’s also creating an entirely new professional role.

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman recently announced: OpenAI is now sending engineers directly to enterprise CEO offices, sitting beside CEOs, automating daily workflows, decision-making processes, and all routine tasks with AI. Shopify’s CEO was the first business leader to fully embrace this model.

This role now has a dedicated term:

FDE — Frontier Deployment Engineer.

Anthropic is doing the same — their Applied AI team specifically deploys engineers to strategic clients’ offices.

Where do they recruit from? From Palantir, Salesforce — from the “veterans” who understand enterprise business best.

The top AI companies are mass-recruiting an entirely new role whose core competency isn’t coding — it’s understanding business, industry, and clients.

FDE isn’t someone sitting at a computer writing code — they’re a “business translator” who walks directly into the enterprise:

Silicon Valley’s top companies are laying off aggressively, yet revenue isn’t declining and products keep shipping. They’re investing more in AI models and agents, not in software development teams.

What enterprises will truly pay for in the future isn’t software products — it’s Tokens and solutions.

Are You “Learning AI” or “Consuming AI”?

At this point you might think: then I should learn AI even harder, right?

First, ask yourself a question: “Where exactly is your time going every day?”

“Yesterday GPT released a new version so I had to test it. Today DeepSeek got an update so I have to test that too. Tomorrow there’ll be another new model…”

Every time a new model drops, comment sections fill with people comparing: which model is slightly better, which Token is slightly cheaper. And after all the comparing?

If you spend 90% of your time researching which knife is sharper but never walk into the forest to chop wood, you’re not sharpening the blade — you’re avoiding the real battle.

“Sharpening the axe doesn’t delay the woodcutting” — most people only understand the first half. But if you sharpen the axe every day and never once go chop wood, that’s not wisdom — that’s you haven’t figured out what you’re actually supposed to do.

Archimedes’ Lever Was Missing One Line

Archimedes said: “Give me a lever long enough, and I can move the earth.”

AI is undoubtedly the “10,000x lever” that can amplify our capabilities 10x, 100x. Used well, 100x isn’t even the ceiling.

But many people forget — Archimedes left out one line:

You need a fulcrum. Without a fulcrum, no matter how long the lever, you can only move air.

What’s a fulcrum? It’s not which AI model you know, nor which programming language you’ve mastered.

AI can write code for you, but it can never replace your understanding of an industry, the trust built face-to-face with clients, or the Domain Know-how accumulated over years on the front lines.

AI can do 100 things for you, but it doesn’t know which one is worth doing. The person who knows the answer is you — the one who accumulated Domain Know-how on the front lines.

From “Software Engineer” to “Business Builder”

All the analysis points to the same conclusion: you need to complete an identity transformation.

Software engineers think “build it and they will come”; business builders think “find the demand first, then use AI to solve the problem.”

Your time allocation must also completely reverse:

AI coding itself has no problem — it gives you the ability to build your own tools.

But your expectations for it must change:

AI coding is your tool, not your way out. Your way out lies in the industry you know best.

One Concrete First Step

Invite an old friend from the industry you know best for a 30-minute chat. Don’t talk about AI, don’t talk about models, don’t talk about tools. Just ask one question:

“In your current work, what tasks are still handled manually and repetitively?”

That manual process that causes pain, high costs, and low efficiency — that is where your fulcrum lies.

Find it, place the 10,000x lever of AI on top, and your capabilities can truly be amplified, creating real value.

The real blue ocean isn’t in the collapsing general software market — it’s hidden in those industry pain points that no one has yet solved with agents.

Finding the right fulcrum is where it truly begins.

Reference

• 别学 AI 编程了，AI 编程是一条死路 - YouTube

别学 AI 编程了，AI 编程是一条死路 - YouTube